With Earth Day approaching, I find myself thinking less about the planet that grounds us and more about the sky beyond. Today’s clear blue sky is living proof of how our human family, when properly motivated, can solve problems.

I remember that first Earth Day in 1970. A 25-year-old naive idealist, I was living on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. A few of us islanders marched down our rural highway in protest of pollution, pollutants, and polluters. We didn’t exactly attract a crowd.

Sunsets in those days were spectacular because the air from Tacoma to Seattle and beyond was dense with industrial and vehicular emissions. A college friend, who’d just earned his business degree, worked at the St. Regis mill on Tacoma’s tide flats, source of the notorious “Tacoma aroma.” He’d make a point of drawing a deep breath and declaring, “Ah, the smell of money!”

After all these years, the Tacoma aroma is no more. I still enjoy sunsets over Puget Sound, but the colors are more delicate, splayed across clear blue skies. What happened? In that year, the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency created. By the 1990s, Americans were getting on board with recycling, and in 2010, a billion people participated globally in Earth Day events.

This year’s worldwide Earth Day challenge is “Planet vs. Plastics.” If you want to get hyped and have 48 seconds to spare, catch the video on the Earth Day website: https://www.earthday.org/.

Plastic is a tragic legacy of my generation. Remember the one word of advice offered to Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate”? 

“Plastics!” It might as well have been a snake hissing, “Eat the apple!”

But I was speaking of air quality. Stay with me, if you would, because Washington state has one of the most advanced programs in the nation to curtail green house gases — the Climate Commitment Act. Yet on Earth Day, instead of celebrating progress, we’ll be hunkering down to withstand a predictably noisy campaign to repeal that law. It’s one of those confusing ballot issues: if you’re for something, like clean air, you have to vote against.

The CCA is a cap-and-trade program. Simply put, a hundred or so major polluters in the state are required to pay for polluting above a certain level. The law went into effect just last year, yet already raised $1.5 billion. That money is designated for a vast array of programs, such as assisting communities that are overburdened by their industrial neighbors, combatting wildfires, and making public transportation available to more of the public.

The repeal effort started with one wealthy hedge fund manager who poured a million bucks into putting six initiatives before the Legislature. He was the single largest backer. Thus, along with other complex issues, we voters will be asked to consider Initiative 2117, repealing the CCA. Given that many millions will be spent on the campaign, those numbers — 2117 — will likely be imprinted deep into our brains. Bill Gates, who easily has as much money to toss around as any hedge fund manager, has already contributed a million to defeat the initiative.

Another opponent includes — astonishingly — one of the bigger polluters, oil company BP, which operates the largest refinery at Cherry Point. Apparently BP accepts paying for the cap-and-trade allowances as an inevitable cost of doing business. The company issued a statement saying the law “helps companies develop climate strategies.”

As my college buddy all those years back in Tacoma said, “Ah, the smell of money!” As the barrage of 2117 and all the other political advertising gets underway, I’m sensing a coma aroma.